The Thin Pink Line Read online

  No sooner had the red lights on the car of Chance Reynolds, our mother’s date, disappeared around the corner of the gravel drive, than I turned to Little Miss In-Charge. “I’ve got an idea for a game,” I announced.

  Sophie bit her lip. “Will it get me in trouble?”

  “Nah. You’re gonna love it. You’ll even like the taste.”

  “Oh dear.” She’d picked that one up from our mother and, I must say, it sounded ridiculous coming regularly as it did out of the mouth of a twelve-year-old.

  “Isn’t that the key to Mother’s liquor cabinet?” she asked, as I dangled something on a chain hypnotically before her very eyes.

  “You are a clever girl. We, my dear Soph, are going to play a little game called Bartender and Patron.” I led her through the house and to the cabinet in the entertainment room, just like you’d lead a seal at a water show.

  With her just-washed straight blond hair, knife-parted on the side, her fresh white cotton granny nightgown and her yogurt complexion, she looked just like an advert for the perfect English child. This put her in stark contrast to my own ill-advisedly sunburned cheeks, self-cut hairstyle that didn’t quite work, and low-cut leopard pajamas I’d talked my mother’s sister Harriet into buying for me when no one else was around.

  “I think it’s safe to say that I should be the bartender, don’t you?” I asserted, taking my position behind the mahogany bar and bending over to unlock the cabinet. “After all, my attire makes me more suited to the position, while yours, well, makes you look like someone who could use a drink.”

  This, of course, was back in the days when it was still acceptable for people to drink beverages other than wine and beer openly, and so our mother’s cabinet was stocked admirably, particularly since most of the stocking had been done by our late father, a man who’d never been known to say no. The time period meant that there were also cushioned leather barstools set up in front of the bar, as though people might freely indulge in our household at any time, although no one ever did since we’d put Father in the ground. I indicated that Sophie should pull one up and she carefully did, hopping on, her clean feet with their neatly trimmed little toenails dangling over the side.

  “So,” I said, pulling a crystal tumbler out and dusting it off for her, “what’ll it be, madam?”

  “Umm…” She hesitated, pulling on her lower lip, but then brightening after a moment. “A sherry?” she requested hopefully.

  “Can’t you do any better than that? Why, you can have a taste of one of those practically any time you want to, so long as Aunt Harriet’s visiting. How about something you haven’t had before?”

  More lower lip pulling and umming on Sophie’s part while I rooted around among the mostly dust-covered bottles in the cabinet.

  “Aha!” I gave the cry of the newly resurrected as I rose with my find. “Well—” I placed it on the bar “—what do you think of that?”

  Sophie studied the label on the bottle I’d drawn from the back, peering closely at the reassuring pictorial depiction of a cluster of blackberries on the vine. “Blackberry Snaps,” she misread slowly, as though she were a bit of an idiot instead of twelve years old. She looked up at me with a weak smile adorning her lips. “How bad can it be?”

  “That’s the spirit!”

  To be fair to myself, it wasn’t as though I knew how much I was giving her when I filled her tumbler to the brim and, as for the percentage of proof listed clearly on the front of the bottle, well, at that stage in my life such a figure meant almost nothing to me.

  She took a sip, grimacing at the first strongly alcoholic taste. “Ghastly,” she pronounced, wiping the residue from her lips with the back of her hand, as if in doing so she could make the flavor go away altogether. Instead of pushing the tumbler disgustedly away, however, as I might have expected her to have done, she grabbed onto it again, studying it closely, as though it were some kind of schoolyard nemesis that she could overcome only by staring it down. “That’s odd,” she commented. “At first, it really does taste ghastly. But then, after you’ve gotten past the horrible part, the blackberry part begins to hit you and then it’s really a bit of all right.”

  I’d never heard buttoned-down Sophie use the “a bit of all right” phrase in her life. This was getting interesting, and going right according to my plan. (Actually, there wasn’t any set plan, per se, save a general plan in which I merely wanted something to happen.)

  Sophie took another sip, a bigger one this time, then gestured in my direction with her now half-empty glass. “Aren’t you going to have any yourself?”

  “Course. Just wanted to set you up right first, that’s all. You know, that is how you play Bartender and Patron.”

  I made a show of looking inside the cabinet for another large tumbler like hers. There were the remaining eleven of a matched set there, but instead, I selected a single-shot glass. After all, I may not have known what exactly a particular proof implied, but I wasn’t stupid about liquor. “That’s odd,” I informed her as I filled her tumbler to the brim and poured the single shot into my glass, “it appears that there was only the one like yours under there. Oh, well.” I saluted her with my shot. “I’ll just have to keep refilling mine more often.”

  But I didn’t. As the evening wore on, I kept refilling our glasses at the same rate, so that the rate roughly fell that she was consuming four ounces of “snaps” to my every one. By the time we were each on our third, I began to feel like someone else completely. The thought vaguely entered my mind, just once, that if I were being so affected, God knows what was happening to four-to-one Sophie.

  Apparently, what was happening to Sophie was that she was beginning to feel like someone else as well.

  Sophie lay on the couch in reverse position like one of those tarot cards, perhaps The Hanged Man or something. Her back was on the part where her bottom should have been, with her now tangled hair dangling over the side until it grazed the carpet. There were purple stains on her white cotton granny nightgown, which was somewhat rucked up about her hips. As for her bare legs, they were straight up in the air, ankles leaning against the top of the couch while her toes danced to their own tune, one that looked remarkably like the Charleston. Every time she tried to slur something else at me, which was often, she gestured with her right hand, the half-filled tumbler she held on to metronoming wildly over Mother’s new cream-colored couch.

  “Do you know, Jane…” she began.

  “Watch the glass, Soph,” I cautioned for the umpteenth time, steadying her hand with my own.

  I was seated cross-legged on the floor beside her in such a way that I could keep an eye on her dangerous glass, her face upside down to me. In that position, with some real-live color on her cheeks, I found her to be almost pretty.

  “Do you know, Jane,” she began again, more determinedly this time, “I don’t particularly like being Mother’s favorite. I don’t know how this all ever started. Do you really imagine that it’s ever any fun, feeling as though one has to be perfect at all times?”

  And it was at that exact moment that the feeling that had been growing in me all night long fully crystallized, for it was at that exact moment that I first loved my sister.

  “You really don’t like it?” I asked trepidatiously, for once the cautious one.

  “Cor, no,” she shook her head in time with the glass, dropping idiomatically back into that linguistic black hole in her personality from which she’d dragged that “bit of all right” line earlier. She burped, covering her mouth with her hand far too late. “Hate it.” Now Sophie the Virtuous wasn’t even speaking in full sentences anymore.

  The bonding just got better from there.

  We baked a lopsided cake, making a mess of the kitchen as we dyed the frosting with all of the colors in the dye box, meaning that it finally ended up being a brownish-black with bits of blue, green, yellow and red on the edges where we hadn’t mixed it in thoroughly. This brownish-black color was very deceptive since it would m
ake eaters think that the frosting was chocolate fudge when in reality it was meant to be vanilla buttercream. Still, I don’t think it mattered much since, to my recollection, no one ever ate any.

  Then we arranged the furniture throughout the public parts of the house to our own liking.

  After that, Sophie threw up some of her Blackberry “Snaps” while I held her hair out of the way. For the first time in my life, I felt like a sister.

  Then we went to bed.

  “Night, Jane,” Sophie said sleepily as I tucked her in. “Love you.” Then she rolled over.

  I studied the white cotton back before pulling the cord on her lamp. “Night, Soph,” I spoke softly, proceeding with the utmost caution. “Like you too.”

  Then I retired to my own room next door.

  The next morning, when our mother discovered the damage and the unlocked cabinet, having not turned on the lights upon her return the night before but having done so in the stark light of early day, she went immediately to Sophie’s room next door. I heard the sound of murmuring voices, but was unable to make out words until Sophie’s voice pealed out: “And it was all Jane’s idea!”

  The fact that I heard her wretch up the schnapps for the second time not long afterward did nothing to mitigate the circumstantial fact that I was now back to hating my sister.

  Nearly two decades later, my feelings toward Soph had changed little.

  It was a clear Saturday in June, early on in my “third month,” and I’d invited my mother and Sophie over for elevenses. I’d figured that, having already told everyone that I worked with (including those that I hated like Stan from Accounting), as well as the man who was in fact supposedly the father of my child, I might as well tell my mother and sister before news reached them first in that telephone-line sort of way that this kind of news always seems to have. I’d laid in a vast supply of decaf teas, in honor of Sophie’s virtuous-pregnant-lady eating patterns, as well as enough pastries the size of a small person’s head for my mother. Never mind fairy cakes; I had giant napoleons, gargantuan éclairs, and I’d even purchased a full-size pink-and-blue cake in the shape of a baby rattle.

  So naturally, my mother didn’t show.

  “What do you mean she’s not coming?” I fishwifed at Sophie as the rest of her body followed her swollen belly into my living room.

  At any other time, I would have been pleased to note that the hormones of pregnancy had dulled the normally bright sheen of her hair, leaving it flat and stringy compared to my own healthy cut; but I was too busy having a childish meltdown to take satisfactory note of that or the fact that pregnancy had clearly caused her to take leave of the extraordinary fashion sense she’d always possessed, the oversize smock she wore with its little bow at the collar proving once and for all that too much progesterone can be a very dangerous thing in the wrong hands.

  “What do you mean she’s not coming?” I demanded a second time as Tony deposited her on my sofa, kissed her on the top of the head and promised to return to collect her in an hour, before escaping.

  “I’m sorry, Jane,” she said, not really sounding very bothered about it at all as she sought to adjust my pillows for her comfort. Anyone would have thought that I was practically hopping from foot to foot in front of her for my own benefit. “But Mother really couldn’t make it. She said to give you her apologies, but when she originally told you she would come, she’d forgotten that Saturday morning at eleven actually means Saturday morning at eleven and that’s when she prefers to have her nails done.”

  “Her nails? But this is important!”

  Now it was Sophie’s turn to sniff with indignation. “Oh. Important, is it? Well, you could have said as much on the phone, instead of being so mysterious about it as you were. I mean, do you have to always be so Mata Hari? ‘If you’re free at eleven on Saturday, I’d love it if you could pop by.’ Why can’t you just say it’s urgent if it’s urgent? God!”

  “What’s the matter with you, Soph, maternity bra too tight?”

  “No. I’ve just got to pee again for the fortieth time today. Do you mind?” she asked, returning to the state of dull mildness that generally characterized her personality as she struggled to her feet, one hand to her lower back as she slowly made her way down the hall. Good God, you’d think she was ready to pop at any moment, instead of being only something like seven months gone.

  “Ah,” she said as she came back into the living room a few moments later, hand to belly with the beatific smile restored. “I feel ever so much better now.” She resettled herself on the sofa as I poured her a beaker of chamomile tea. “So tell me, Jane, what was so important that you wanted us both here so badly today? You know,” she leaned toward me, more reasonably now but also not giving me a reasonable chance to answer the question she’d just posed, “if you had told Mother that you had something important to tell us both, you know she probably would have tried to find another time to get her nails done.”

  This last comment made me feel so unreasonably exasperated that, if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn that I was pregnant, too. “When,” I demanded with deliberate steel in my tone, “was the last time I invited you both to come round?”

  She made a considering face for a moment, then answered, eyes wide, “Never.”

  “And how long have I been inhabiting this flat?”

  She considered again. “Mmm…couple of years?”

  “Close enough. So if I’ve lived here a fair length of time and I’ve never invited you both over, then if I did it must be because of something…” and here I left a blank where the last word should be, making a rolling-along motion with my hand as though she were a semi-bright child who might be depended on to guess if given enough time and encouragement.

  “…important?” she finally filled in after a lengthy pause.

  “Bing.” I applauded. “Give the girl a cake,” which I tried to do but she declined, claiming it wasn’t wholesome for the baby and did I have any radishes instead.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

  “What’s so ridiculous about radishes? You are a fairly health-conscious person. Anyway, I’ve been having an uncontrollable urge for them lately. That and cake. But since I mustn’t have the cake—”

  “Never mind that now,” I said, picking up Punch the Cat from the dining table and tossing him back on the ground where he properly belonged. I didn’t know where he’d been hiding all morning but, apparently, he’d developed an uncontrollable urge for cake as well, as evidenced by the healthy serving of buttercream frosting he’d managed to swipe off of the pink side of the rattle cake. I smiled what I hoped was a sincere smile and took a seat beside Sophie, determining to do things nicely. “What I wanted to tell you was—”

  “You know, pregnant women aren’t supposed to be around strange cats or change litter boxes.”

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose, praying for patience. For this, I’d given up a glorious Saturday morning that I could have been spending with the father of my child, biking through the park? I’d traded the park for, of all things, toxoplasmosis?

  Of course, truth to tell, I wouldn’t have been biking with Trevor if Sophie weren’t there. Even though it was a Saturday, he’d left early to attend to some pressing work that he said he could do even though the office was closed on Saturdays. He’d been doing that a lot lately: working. And, of course, if Sophie weren’t there, I’d be working, too. Since the slush pile that accumulates on the metaphorical shores of publishing houses never really ebbs back to the ocean where so much of it belongs, and since Dodo had additionally been entrusting me with more of her work lately, my pregnancy having earned me an odd kind of office status, I’d been taking more and more work home, too. Still, I told myself, I had invited Sophie for the purpose of bonding….

  “Yes,” I said, trying to fight off the residual feeling that I’d rather be reading bad writing than discussing litter boxes, “I believe I remember reading about that somewhere.”

  “It h
as something to do with a disease they can carry. They pick it up when they go outside and kill and eat rats and other things.”

  “Yes. I know. But Punch the Cat isn’t a strange cat, not really. Well, I mean, he is a strange cat but not in the sense you mean. Anyway, he never goes outside, much as I’d like him to, so there’s really no worry that he’s—”

  “We still had a cat when I was first pregnant.”

  “You did?” This was news to me. But then, Sophie hadn’t been to my flat since I’d lived there, so why on earth should I have known that she had once kept a cat in hers?

  “Yes,” she replied, clearly not bothered at all herself by our mutual lack of knowledge regarding each other’s lives. “Bugles, she was called.”

  “For any reason?”

  “Reason? I don’t know. Tony named her and I never asked. Anyway, when I got pregnant and he wanted me to give up work, he said it wouldn’t be good for me to be around Bugles and her litter box all day, even though all the books say that if you have the cat already there’s probably no need to get rid of it. So we put an ad in the paper and the cutest little girl came to the door with her parents and with her very own box—”

  “For herself or for Bugles?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Was the box for the cat or the cute little girl?”

  “Why, for the cat, of course. I don’t see why you would ever think—”

  “Oh, would you just be quiet!” I shouted. “Can’t you see that I’m pregnant?”

  “No, of course I can’t, because you’re so skinny. But anyway, getting back to the cat—” But before I could cut her off this time, she did it to herself, as her hands flew to the sides of her face in disbelief.

  “You’re never!” she cried, oddly echoing the girls at the office.

  “Oh, am I ever,” I replied, fully versed now in my lines.

  “My God,” she said in a hushed tone, and then she did something that she’d never done before. She reached out and hugged me, tenderly pulling me to her as though she were my older sister by far more than one year.